The late Lya de Putti, German screen actress, paid me the nicest
compliment of all.
She was up front in the two-place passenger compartment of a Lockheed
Sirius. The owner of that plane was in the pilot's open cockpit just
back of her. And I was behind him in the rear cockpit.
He had insisted, against my better judgment, upon getting into that
pilot's cockpit in the first place. But, after all, he owned the ship, I
was only his pilot, and there was a set of dual controls in the rear
cockpit.
The motor quit cold over Whitehall, N. Y., because we ran out of gas in
one of the six tanks in the ship. I shouted back and forth with the
ship's owner, halfway to the ground, trying to tell him how to turn on
one of the other five tanks. There was a complicated system of gas
valves in the ship, and I couldn't make him understand what to do, and I
couldn't reach the valves myself.
Finally I shouted, "You play with them. I'll land," and stuck my head
out and looked around. We were already low. I picked a small plowed
field, the only likely-looking one in the mountainous country, and
started into it.
I was coming around my last turn into the field when I discovered
high-tension wires stretching right across the edge of it. I was too low
to pick another field. The field was too small to go over the wires. I
had to go through a gap in the trees to get under them.
I kicked the ship around sidewise. The trees flashed past me on either
side, and I hit the ground. The wires flashed past over my head. I used
my brakes and stopped the fast ship very quickly in the soft ground. If
we had rolled fifty feet farther we would have hit an embankment that
rose sharply at the far end of the field.
I crawled out of my cockpit and started to help Lya out of her cabin.
She was already emerging, fanning herself with a handkerchief. She spoke
with a German accent.
"Oh, Jeemy," she said, "all the way down I pray to God. But I thank you,
Jeemy. I thank you."